


Do I Wake?

by Whatho



Category: Nightingales (UK)
Genre: Dubious Consent, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-20
Updated: 2010-07-20
Packaged: 2017-10-10 16:54:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/101973
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Whatho/pseuds/Whatho
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carter and Bell are Shakespearian lovers. Carter hopes it won't be the lowest point of his existence. This heavily references the episode 'Trouble in Mind': that's the one in which a psychiatrist suggests it'd be a good idea for Bell to have sex with Carter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Do I Wake?

Carter can't remember what goes on in night-time dreams. Leave frees his nights for sleep, and it doesn't help in the slightest. He'll keep his working rhythms 'cause it turns out daylight living does not exactly show him off to his full advantage. Communicating with sophisticated types via the medium of sparkler-dance and a-cappella nursery rhymes with actions goes down fine after midnight, but try it in the day and they mostly just look at you funny. He'll kip a bit on shift from time to time – lulls in the drudgery; open-heart surgery and the like; once, degradingly, on Ding-Dong's shoulder while the court psychiatrist plumbed the depths of the sarge's mind with a view to working out why Carter wanted Sarge for a dad and why Bell wanted to have sex with Carter – but never enough to fall much into dreams. He gets to that stage where you think you've just stepped off the pavement without noticing you'd come to the edge, then he slumps half a foot in his chair and he's awake. He's just the odd hazy memory he puts down to REM. Had one last night. Young Swan's coming back to them: werewolf boy in the waking world, only this time he's got a sore throat and he's ate something dodgy and that's about the size of it. Pretty bland all in all. Ergo that'll be a dream.

In the daytime he dreams of model railways and double-entry bookkeeping. That's how he recognises a dream when he sees one.

One summer, Bell takes himself a chunk of holiday and winds up in a portion of Spain that, very like the three of them, wakes up mostly at night. It's all very suiting. But Bell gets to sleeping regular hours by the end of the week, either because he's a contrary bugger or 'cause actually what you need above dance-floor assignations and midnight cocktails is a bit of sheer novelty on your holidays. When he comes back on shift, Bell shows the lads this foot-high mule made of corn husks (Sarge smiles; Carter opens a sizeable volume of Blake) and he brandishes a photo of his guest house's back toilet (Sarge nods; Carter sticks two fingers up but doesn't turn his head) and he gives him the tale of his stopping and staring at a llama stood in the back yard of a seaside pub, after which nothing of note occurred (Sarge is asleep; Carter sinks his face into his hands and wonders out loud what Tom Stoppard's doing tonight), and then three shifts on he tells him some of his dreams.

'Carter?' he says.

And Carter takes his specs off and says 'What?'

It's deranging.

Well, Carter's a bit incredulous at first. Bell's dreams sound overmuch like his being awake. It's absurd. It's like something out of Bosch.

A boring number of shifts later, unpicking the ears of Ding-Dong's mule and thinking back on the donkey Head Office sent to replace the gorilla, he works it out. It's nothing to do with sleeping and waking and that. It's about the proper allocation of convention and surrealism to their respective degrees of light and dark. He sleeps in the day, so he dreams of daytime things: typewriters, dominos, bedding plants and adding-machines. At night, the grand and the absurd stuff happens – werewolf attacks and attempts at the throne – and you see it if you sleep and you see it if you don't. Which explains, at 11.37pm, why Sarge is wearing a lime-green doublet and the staff-room's lit from the footlights and Carter's spent the past hour speaking in iambic pentameter.

'My gawd,' says Carter, and he swipes his glasses from his face with the shock of it. 'My life is intermittently nothing short of heroic.'

'Oh aye?' says Bell when Carter carefully and patiently and monosyllabically and with appropriate gestures explains to him the gist of the above. 'So how come you want to trade it all for them polyester-cotton mix flares?'

'I… ' says Carter. The staff room falls unrealistically out of the shadows.

'I know what you dream about,' says Bell through all his teeth. 'Heathrow. Double-breasted jackets. Nudey men.'

'Those things aren't….' says Carter, massaging his twitchy eyes, sliding his book and his glasses protectively back towards himself.

'Nudey men and stupid boring paintings and gable-ends and Heathrow boring sodding airport and….'

'And so bloody what? You dream about having sex with me,' says Carter, only it comes out in a weirdly triumphant near-shriek so he has to cough and stroke his bobbing Adam's apple to a standstill. Then he bubbles up again, jabbing his finger at Bell's broad forehead and bouncing on his heels till Bell's eyes slowly turn and he sits himself rapidly down again. 'Anyway. That's aspirations, Ding-Dong. It ain't dreams. Semantics, i'n't it.'

'I were cured.' Bell's bellowing now, prodding himself in the chest with his own forefinger, the playing cards scattered half on the table and half on the floor. 'You heard the psych. He said I were cured.'

'And it'd be a highpoint for you, wouldn't it,' splutters Carter right through Bell's sulky words. 'Physically speaking. I very much doubt you're capable of the kind of intellectual and or emotional epiphany an episode of romantic union brings about in the higher minded.' Carter leans back in his seat, breathing hard, ignoring the toe of Bell's boot in his shins, and slips his glasses on again. 'Be some description of climactic existential crisis for me, obviously. What's the opposite of an aspiration?'

Bell rises silently in front of him – kind of reminiscent of the isle of Surtsey – winds his hands into Carter's collar and heaves him to his feet, and then slightly off them. His face is pouring heat. His nails are deep in Carter's neck. He has a daisy chain draped over his wrist that he snaps and shakes to the floor when he sees it.

'You're really not cured, are you?' says Carter.

Bell pulls him marginally closer.

'It'll happen post-nuclear-holocaust,' says Carter, his lower-jaw jumping minutely. 'When you're all that's left. And not even then.'

Bell drops him and storms across to the locker. Sarge moves that way too with a view to soliciting a draughts opponent. Carter sits down shakily, tugging his collar back into shape, tips out a packet of cigs on the table and opens his Houseman one-handed.

'Heroic,' he mutters to himself.

 

*

 

Carter comes in Friday evening dark and cold and brooding, hunched into himself, his right palm clammy from another limp 'we'll let you know' dismissal. While the draughts rhythmically click at his back, he stands rigid at the window, pulling the blinds apart till the pads of his fingers are all over grooves, hugging a hardback full of Renoir prints to his chest and spitting rabid insults at his ambition-free semi-literate colleagues.

'Have a Gypsy Cream,' says Sarge. 'I find them very consoling.'

'Who fancies a game of ping-pong?' says Bell. 'We always used to play ping-pong.'

So Carter scatters the contents of his thermos over their respective heads.

'Ah, come on now. There'll be other chances, Mr Carter,' says Sarge, dabbing his cap, and he stretches over to slap Carter companionably on the shoulder. Carter leans out of reach. 'Till then, there's always us.' Carter runs his fingers despairingly through his beard. 'Have a game of draughts now.'

'Other chances,' he mutters. 'There won't be other chances. They don't see it, none of them. I'm not wanted out there. This is it. This is what they call the nadir. I think they call it the nadir.'

And then he looks hard at Bell, who's quite rubbish at meeting his eyes of late, and his gut makes hungry noises. He remembers dancing in a post-hypnotic haze, and in a tuxedo jacket. He's not remembered that before.

'Yeah,' says Bell, and then he says 'Well. I'm off for a quick look 'round.' He snatches a torch from the locker top and he's gone.

'You're uncommonly enthusiastic tonight, Mr Bell,' says Sarge to the firmly shut door.

Carter continues to look very hard at the space where Bell no longer is. 'Here, Sarge,' he says. 'What's his game then?'

'I couldn't rightly say, lad,' says Sarge. 'But if you were to ask me, you know… if you were to really press me to answer… I'd mostly call it… a crudely wrought but nonetheless massive and pertinent hint of Mr Bell's continued amorous feelings towards your person.'

'Would you?' says Carter.

'I would that,' says Sarge.

'That's what I thought too,' says Carter. He pushes his face back into the blinds and screws it up against the night, which is nonetheless immeasurably more palatable than the day. He feels like a wrongly charged magnet when he goes out among the non-vampiric set: bouncing off the edges of them, like he holds out a hand for a shake and it skews off to the right till he's hold of a lamppost. He can't see a thing out there beyond the blur of the streetlights and the headlights and the other semi-lit office buildings, but there's nothing to kick him aside. It only absorbs him.

'Wanted to adorn you with nuts and berries, he did,' says Sarge, and takes half a dozen of his own red draughts.

'Leave off,' says Carter. 'He's the sensitivity of a whacking great lump of pig iron.' But he smiles shyly all the same, and rubs his thumb across his palm. Two lights go off in the office across the street. Well, it did get a bit prurient, that night, when Bell spilled out his innermost. A little bit base. What's to expect. But it was, in its heart, a highly romantic and not even inelegant spot of fantasy. Ultimately very Grecian. His own innards weren't exactly unfluttering. Oh god.

'Do you not fancy a game of draughts at all, Mr Carter?'

'Sarge?'

'Yes, lad.'

'D'you reckon this could lead me to anywhere other than the very lowest point in my existence?'

Sarge shakes his head and amiably chuckles. 'You're like Shakespearean lovers, the pair of you.'

And Carter works the smile from his face – it's hardly a thing to be happy about – but his pulse is being unnecessarily arrhythmic all the same.

*

At midnight, Carter, neglecting his torch, slips out of the staff room, tracks Bell through the corridors and follows him into the gents. He's spun the chair from the corner and wedged it under the handle before Bell's even finished the top of the 'p' he's daubing in bright red paint across the middle of Carter's watercolour.

'What about the warning, you prat?' says Bell, wiping his palms on his thighs. 'You're not supposed to creep up on me and not give me a chance to do the chickens thing and put me paints away and that.'

'Attend,' says Carter, jerking a shoulder, raising a palm. The lights dim. Momentarily makes Bell look very like he's wearing yellow stockings cross-gartered.

'My liege?' says Bell, which Carter briefly enjoys.

'When,' says he, through a chesty cough, brushing aside the wisps of dry-ice fog that rise into his lungs, 'in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state… well, mostly I lob darts at this print of Durer's rhino I cut out of the Catwell Gazette, you know. Part of an advert for Brasso. It's nothing personal. Got something against the tubercles. But….'

'Aye, go on.'

Carter looks him properly in the eye. 'This bud of love,' he says, 'by summer's ripening breath, may prove a beauteous flower when next we meet.'

Violently Bell shakes his head. 'Thou spakst of love, fair Carter. My feelings do not that way tend.'

'Bell. The potential. Dost. Thou. For me. Feelings in any sense….'

'Feelings liken as unto the rank sweat of an unseamed bed….'

'And beyond? Yay or nay?'

Bell gives it three seconds' serious contemplation. 'Do I get a shag out of this?'

'Yay or nay?'

'Look, leave it out, Carter,' he says, and tries to shoulder his way to the door. Carter catches him and thrusts him violently back.

'Answer me! Yay or nay?'

Bell shrugs.

'Yay,' he says. 'I suppose.'

Carter lets out all his breath. It's quite enough. He steps beneath the watery bulb and falls forward stiff-armed into an equally stiff-armed embrace. It's very courtly. He runs his tongue around his teeth and feels knuckles bouncing lightly on his spine. Bell's uniform jacket under his nose smells musty and ancient.

Carter wilts there, which isn't entirely in the play script.

Bell's all frowns and uneasy angles. With his loosely closed fist, he awkwardly thumps Carter between the shoulders.

'What?' he says. 'What's the matter?'

'I am afeard,' says Carter, muffled in serge.

'Art thou?' says Bell.

'I am afeard, being in night, all this is but a dream.'

'Naw,' says Bell. 'It's not though.'

They stay like that a while more. Carter shifts minutely in Bell's arms.

'What?' says Bell, several degrees more confused.

'Ideally, you see, it'd arise organically from this juncture.'

'It'd do what now?'

Carter sighs against his lapel. Bell's fingers dig momentarily into the sparse flesh under his shoulder blades. His frown deepens. He pushes Carter away from him and holds him off a moment.

Bell's eyes have darkened. Carter thinks it nothing if not Shakespearean.

'Here,' says Bell. 'You can pack the soppy stuff in, Carter. I'm not having you write a bloody poem about this.'

'I wasn't going to write a poem.'

'Cause you can sod that.'

'I heard what you said.' Carter wraps his hands around Bell's upper arms. 'Picnics and ivy and nuts and berries. That was poetry, Ding-Dong. Of a sort.'

'Yeah, and you heard what the psych said,' says Bell. 'It's not love, he said, and anyway he said I were cured.'

'Nay, Bell. 'Twas but a fancy of mine own making. My resolve was feeble. It was a consummation I could not devoutly… oh gawd,' says Carter. He looks briefly to the ceiling. 'This is not going to be the lowest point of my existence.'

'You what?' says Bell.

Carter stares at him a minute. Then he winds his fingers into Bell's collar and leans in. Bell staggers two paces away, all limp and flailing, and still Carter pushes forward. Bell makes some kind of weird, stifled buzzing noise and Carter's expecting a knee to the groin any second. Still he doesn't leave off, and then suddenly the back of his head slams into a mirror and he's got the edge of the sink in his kidneys. But his shoulders are still under Bell's hands and the air between them smells and tastes of soil and rust and meat-paste. He feels Bell's teeth in his jaw-line, then in his lip, and he closes his eyes. That'll be passion, he thinks.

He only realises he's still got his glasses on when he feels them cutting into the bridge of his nose. He thinks Bell's bound to stop a moment and take them off before they both get an eyeful of glass. When the frames begin to creak and Bell still shoves their brows together, his chest heats up with the gritty indelicate fervour of the thing. God. It's all so fantastically pre-Raphaelite.

Still, that doesn't mean his nose don't hurt like sin.

'Hang on a minute,' says Carter, quiet and breathless so as not to break the mood, only he's not actually pitching himself loud enough to hear, so he has to get an elbow between their two bodies and say it again in a near shout.

'Hang on a bloody minute!'

'Shut it,' murmurs Bell, then he pulls back a little, not enough to bring himself into focus. 'What?'

Carter lifts his glasses on one finger and gestures at the gully. 'Almost through to the bone,' he says.

'Nance,' says Bell, steaming and snorting, trying to push forward again. Carter frowns and takes three deep breaths, keeping an arm braced against Bell's heaving great barrel of a chest.

'Come now, cousin. Is yet the day so aged?'

'Stop faffing about, Carter. I'm in a hurry here.'

With his free hand, Carter reaches up and takes his own glasses off.

Bell grunts approval and glances sideways at the door. The chair being unshaken and the corridor outside being empty and silent and echoey, he turns back with his eyes all hard and set and glittery. Carter folds his specs one-handed, kind of trembling, and balances them between the taps as Bell swaps hands on his upper arms and twists him sharply round so he can see his face all pale and blurred and backed with a row of off-white urinals in the graffiti-stained mirror. He smashes breastbone first into the corner of the basin.

'Oh speak again, bright angel! for thou art as glorious to this night….'

He chokes on iron and Bell says nothing. Carter coughs a pinkish froth onto the enamel. He screws his eyes shut. He'd like to wake up now. Fall asleep. Whichever this isn't.

*

Sarge cracks open a brand new packet of Gypsy Creams. The door creaks slowly open but the cry of 'Anybody there?' does not go up. Sarge lifts his head as Carter limps alone into the half-lit staff room, an arm across his spongy ribs, his lenses oddly mottled and his lower-lip trickling blood.

'Ah, lad,' says the sarge. 'The two of you've not been fighting again? Like children, you are. Or Shakespearian… '

'Villains, I know,' says Carter, thickly, and eases himself into a plastic chair. 'Well… to be expected, isn't it, post-duel. You want to see the other fellow.'

He can't make out the sarge too clear and he doesn't really look too hard but he fancies what he spots is an approving smile. Like you'd give a very bemedalled general. That sort of thing. He hears battlefield trumpets and cracks his spine unnaturally straight. The helmet's heavy on his head.

'Jousting, was it? Or broadswords?'

'Yes,' says Carter, remembering his jousting most clearly. He beckons the sarge, flicks his wristlet back up his arm, then he points. 'See, noble Sarge, the burning torch in yonder turret stands.'

'Where now, lad?'

'In yonder ashtray. Well. Now… let it shine like a comet of revenge. See. That's what I'm saying.' He hears three rousing cheers. 'Yeah,' he goes on, bravely swallowing his bloody spittle. 'What feats I did this day.' He retrieves the still-glowing stub. 'You'll hold yourself accursed you were not there. I'm telling you.'

Sarge nods and smiles and cracks his paper. Bell rhythmically stamps out the corridors on the fifth floor like nothing's changed. Carter hears the roaring in his ears die back. He wraps his standard about himself, fills his mouth with smoke, and he wonders what Alan Ayckbourn's doing tonight.


End file.
